“Nay, Christine; I am too poor a man to throw away so much hard-won gold.  I am keeping it until I can see Mr. McFarlane and quietly collect my own.”

“You will never use it in any way against him?”

“Will you ever marry him?  Tell me that.”

“O sir!” she cried indignantly, “you want to make a bargain with my poor heart.  Hear, then.  If Donald wants me to marry him I’ll never cast him off.  Do you think God will cast him off for one fault?  You dare not say it.”

“I do not say but what God will pardon.  But we are human beings; we are not near to God yet.”

“But we ought to be trying to get near him; and oh, James, you never had so grand a chance.  See the pitiful face of Christ looking down on you from the cross.  If that face should turn away from you, James—­if it should!”

“You ask a hard thing of me, Christine.”

“Yes, I do.”

“But if you will only try and love me—­”

“Stop, James!  I will make no bargain in a matter of right and wrong.  If for Christ’s sake, who has forgiven you so much, you can forgive Donald, for Christ’s dear sake do it.  If not, I will set no earthly love before it.  Do your worst.  God can find out a way.  I’ll trust him.”

“Christine! dear Christine!”

“Hush!  I am Donald’s promised wife.  May God speak to you for me.  I am very sad and weary.  Good-night.”

James did not wait for David’s return.  He went back to his own lodging, and, taking the note out of his pocket-book, spread it before him.  His first thought was that he had wared L89 on his enemy’s fine clothes, and James loved gold and hated foppish, extravagant dress; his next that he had saved Andrew Starkie L89, and he knew the old usurer was quietly laughing at his folly.  But worse than all was the alternative he saw as the result of his sinful purchase:  if he used it to gratify his personal hatred, he deeply wounded, perhaps killed, his dearest love and his oldest friend.  Hour after hour he sat with the note before him.  His good angel stood at his side and wooed him to mercy.  There was a fire burning in the grate, and twice he held the paper over it, and twice turned away from his better self.

The watchman was calling “half-past two o’clock,” when, cold and weary with his mental struggle, he rose and went to his desk.  There was a secret hiding-place behind a drawer there, in which he kept papers relating to his transactions with Andrew Starkie, and he put it among them.  “I’ll leave it to its chance,” he muttered; “a fire might come and burn it up some day.  If it is God’s will to save Donald, he could so order it, and I am fully insured against pecuniary loss.”  He did not at that moment see how presumptuously he was throwing his own responsibility on God; he did not indeed want to see anything but some plausible way of avoiding a road too steep for a heart weighed down with earthly passion to dare.